Apple Reports $35 Billion Quarterly Revenues, $8.8 Billion Profits

Apple has reported its third quarter financial results, headlining with a quarterly revenue of $35 billion and net profit of $8.8 billion. Although Apple beat its own guidance on every figure, analysts had been predicting revenues of about $37 billion, profits of about $10.36 per share instead of $9.32.

That's up from figures of $28.6 billion for revenue and profit of $7.3 billion in the same quarter for 2011. Gross margin, a measure of how efficiently Apple can turn its sales into profits, rose from 41.7% in the same quarter of 2011 to 42.8% in this year's quarter. Underlining how far outside the U.S. Apple's business has spread, 62% of revenues were accounted for by international sales.

Among the sales, Apple sold 26 million iPhones in the quarter, which represents a 28% unit growth year on year. 17 million iPads were sold, at an 84% growth. 4 million Macs were sold, at a 2% growth rate and 6.8 million iPods were sold, representing a 10% unit decline year-on-year (this last figure was anticipated given previous iPod sales declines and the lessening importance of the overall MP3 player market in the face of skyrocketing smartphone sales).

In the conference call concerning the results both CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer commented about rumors about the upcoming Apple products affecting sales figures of on-sale equipment, and mentioned depressed sales in financial crisis-stricken-Europe as contributing to Apple's overall sales picture.

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